A typical healthcare organization has many legacy patient records in different formats. Across the different formats, patient information is often partially duplicated where each record format varies in its level of completeness from patient to patient. To obtain a complete and single view of a patient, healthcare organizations have attempted to consolidate their legacy healthcare records.
One approach used to consolidate legacy healthcare records involves a creation of a master patient index (MPI). A master patient index (MPI) is a database that is used across a healthcare organization to maintain consistent, accurate and current demographic and essential medical data on the patients seen and managed within its various departments. An objective of an MPI is to ensure that each patient is represented only once across all the software systems used within the organization.
To generate an MPI each patient is assigned a unique identifier that is used to refer to this patient across the enterprise. Then, for each patient, the individual's legacy healthcare records are identified, matched, merged, de-duplicated, and cleansed to create a master index that may be used. The essential patient data can include name, gender, date of birth, race and ethnicity, social security number, current address and contact information, insurance information, etc.
Many hospitals and other healthcare organizations have struggled to achieve the necessary level of efficiency in the MPI management process to eliminate existing record keeping issues and reduce the likelihood that future ones will develop. Part of the problem is limited resources. The MPI management process can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, requiring dedicated human resources and special expertise which hospitals have difficulty retaining. Further, the typical MPI management process is primarily manual and therefore inefficient and prone to human error. In view of the above, new methods are needed for creating and managing MPIs.